A market-seller's rhyme about a woman who makes her living selling codlins, hot baked apples, on the street. The refrain of 'hot, hot, hot!' begs to be said with rising enthusiasm.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
There was a little woman, as I've been told,
Who was not very young, nor yet very old;
Now this little woman her living got
By selling codlins, hot, hot, hot!
About this rhyme
Music by John Whitaker, words by Charles Dibdin the Younger; sung by Joseph Grimaldi from Easter 1819, in the pantomime The Talking Bird, or, Perizade Columbine. · The audience's genuine call-and-response word in the original song was 'gin' (a later verse), not 'hot'. That part of the song isn't in this shorter, commonly printed verse. · 'Codlin(g)' is a real early-ripening cooking-apple variety; hawking hot roast/baked apples in the street was a genuine Georgian/Victorian London trade.
This rhyme started on the stage. In 1819 the clown Joseph Grimaldi sang it as the opening of a longer comic song about an applewoman down on her luck, and it became one of his most famous turns. "Codlins" are cooking apples, sold hot by a street seller, which is exactly who this little woman is. Say the last line like a market cry, and draw out every "hot!"
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition